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Going digital and putting the customer first are two of the biggest trends influencing business today. And Belgian telecoms company Proximus has found a unique way to fuse the two together. Jeroen Degraeuwe, Business & IT Transformation Lead at Proximus is part of the team trailblazing this approach. “We’re co-creating our digitalisation strategy with our business customers,” he explained. “Instead of taking a B2B approach, we want to take a B2P approach – business-to-people. And this means getting customers and employees involved, not just senior executives.”

As part of its Voice of the Customer initiative, Proximus holds regular workshops at both a strategic and functional level to help shape its digitalisation efforts and define the customer journey. Proximus has more than 50.000 business customers on its books and is one of the three largest mobile telecommunications providers in Belgium.

As well as digitalising its own business, Proximus wants to help customers on their journey. “We want to empower organisations to digitally enable their employees, engage with their customers, and transform their products and services,” said Geert Rottier, Director of Corporate Market at Proximus.

To help customers achieve their digital ambitions, Proximus must be a digital pioneer. And that’s where its Trailblazers come in. “We recognised that we needed a new platform to support our digital efforts,” said Bart Callens, Business Transformation Manager at Proximus. “Our legacy systems couldn’t provide the capabilities we needed or deliver the experiences our internal users and customers expected.”

“The speed of response is crucial to establishing a thriving business in the digital world. With Salesforce, our business and our people can stay one step ahead of customer needs and one step ahead of the competition.”

Proximus wanted to find a platform and partner that aligned with their roadmap. “With Salesforce we could consolidate on a single platform and eliminate the effort and cost associated with maintenance and upgrades,” said Callens.

To support its Agile model, Proximus also involved its customers, internal users, and a Salesforce partner, Infosys, in the implementation of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. “The collaboration was great and delivered loads of value,” said Degraeuwe. “By tapping into a broad pool of expertise, we were able to accelerate implementation and adoption.”

With Salesforce Success Cloud, the transformation team at Proximus was able to take its collaborative and agile deployment approach one step further. It participated in workshops with Salesforce technical architects, encouraged its team to complete Trailhead learning paths, and deployed Accelerators for Salesforce Mobile App and Chatter adoption. “Effective change management was fundamental. Success Cloud made it easier for the team leading the transformation to understand what was possible and how we could meet user expectations.” said Degraeuwe.

Degraeuwe and his colleagues have not just met expectations, they’ve exceeded them. “We’re still in the early stages, but so far the transformation has gone down really well,” said Callens. “Once we’ve built the foundations, we’ll be able to move so much faster, adopt best practices, and gain significant competitive advantage.”

The Salesforce Mobile App has proved particularly popular, empowering sales reps to access and update data on the go. “The mobile app has been a game-changer for our sales teams. Previously, they had to return to the office to view customer details and provide updates from meetings, now they can do it all while on the road,” said Rottier.

Proximus has simplified a number of other core sales processes, such as opportunity management and pipeline forecasting. With more than 700 account managers, sales reps, administrators, and pre-sales specialists at Proximus all using Sales Cloud, that represents a big leap in productivity. “With greater visibility, we can drive better sales performance,” confirmed Rottier.

Proximus wants to bring the same level of transparency and simplicity to its B2B Contact Centre, which responds to more than 3500 customer queries every day. “Historically, we had four siloed departments for fixed line, mobile, cloud solutions, and integrator services, each using a different system, explained Callens. “With Service Cloud, 500-plus agents in nine locations can all collaborate on the same platform, which helps us provide a more joined-up service to our customers.”

In the future, Proximus wants to empower customers to resolve their own queries by providing a range of self-service options via Community Cloud, from logging change requests and viewing products to requesting quotes and registering invoice queries. “Lots of our corporate customers also use Salesforce, so there’s the potential to integrate our systems, which will deliver efficiency savings for everyone,” said Rottier.

Proximus has also just launched a partner community, which will support the indirect sales channel and customer service. “With Salesforce, there’s always another idea around the corner. The online community and Chatter will make it easier to support our partners and provide greater insights,” added Callens.

With Salesforce and its pioneering approach to transformation, Proximus can align its digital ambitions to those of its customers, and achieve them faster. “The speed of response is crucial to establishing a thriving business in the digital world,” said Degraeuwe. “With Salesforce, our business and our people can stay one step ahead of customer needs and one step ahead of the competition."